一個很"不教會"的教會  An Unchurched Church! by Jill Austin

我們需要的是神大能的福音,而不是滿足自己社交生活功能的教會!

Knowing the Times and Seasons
An Unchurched Church

Excerpts taken from
Dancing With Destiny: Awaken your Heart to Dream, to Love, to War
by Jill Austin(節錄自Jill新書Dancing With Destiny)

 

 

Be Blessed,

Jill Austin

An Unchurched Church

Several years ago I visited a large church in Copenhagen, Denmark, because I had heard that a Nigerian healing evangelist was having meetings there. He was the talk of the town. In Denmark only one percent of the people is saved, yet large crowds were staying past midnight because the Lord was healing the sick.

It was ten at night when I first heard about this; I had been ministering in another city. I was interested to go to the church, so my host couple took me. When we arrived, we saw probably fifteen hundred people there. And they loved it! You could see and feel their enthusiasm.



When I looked at the crowd, I could tell they were mostly an unchurched group. Along with many businessmen and women, there were people in the occult, Yuppies, prostitutes, artists, street people-people from every walk of life imaginable. Broken, hurting people were getting prayer for everything from cancer to all kinds of deformities. The people were standing or sitting, waiting for hours to get prayer for healing. Miracles were happening everywhere. The people were intrigued!

I met the pastor and said, "I love the people! I can tell that they are not a church crowd. How did you get them here?"

He said, "Well, Jill, we just advertise. We advertise in all of the New Age papers and in all of the secular papers. We say, 'Are you sick? Are you in pain? Do you need a miracle?' Many people come who don't know the Lord. They get healed and they

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end up accepting Him. We have more than eight hundred people who have just signed up for the Alpha [Bible teaching] course from our week of meetings. We will start to disciple them, but they came because they got a miracle and the power of the Gospel was demonstrated."

He went on to say, "A lot of people get hurt in churches, and they leave for 'seeker-friendly' places that have more of a 'social' gospel or an 'intellectual' gospel. They don't want to get hurt again. And they don't want the emotionalism that can come with the Spirit-filled churches. So they find churches that may have great biblical teaching but no demonstration of the power of God. There is the Word, but there is not much of the Spirit. They will go for their forty-five minutes, and then they want to get their kids home.

"But those in the world are not jaded by the power of God. They have not been in controversial moves of the Holy Spirit. They want a display of signs and wonders. So often we feel that if God starts to grip people we will offend the unsaved. The reality is that we offend the church, the religious folks, the Pharisees. We offend the people who have a controlling spirit."

That experience reminded me of Paul's missionary trip through Asia Minor (see Acts 19:1-10). Ephesus was a stronghold of witchcraft. The people he preached to had been exposed to sorcery; they were open in their spirits to the demonic realm. So when they saw the signs and wonders that the Lord worked through Paul and his team, they recognized true power. It was easy to bring them to the cross with Jesus.

The government of God backed up Paul's words with such extraordinary signs and wonders that an entire continent was touched in two years! As Paul explained, "My speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God" (1 Corinthians 2:4-5).

Beloved, it will take more than just eloquent teaching to touch this generation. We must have the power of God! We need to cry out for a fresh baptism of fire-another Pentecost-if we want this magnitude of revival in our cities.

Can you imagine the Gospel spreading so quickly that even the pagan leaders of other countries would be saved? If it happened two thousand years ago, why not today, too? When there is a demonstration of the Holy Spirit's power, entire nations will be transformed.
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